TENCHI'S HALLOWEEN HORROR
by Ministry Agent
Summary: Imagine a story that's over six feet tall and looks like a man. And imagine that story takes you over to one side, throws open its arms and sprays words all over your face. That's this story. And it will severely shock-up your mind.


**Important Sexual Info:- **Lacto-Cannibal-Pyro-Necro-Zoophilia may involve having sex with a cheeseburger, or some such / Multiple generations of inbreeding may result in severe physical deformity. Watch those recessive genes! "IT'S SO FREUDIAN!" / Squicking is the act of, well, you know... (wood drills, meat sculpture etc. may fall under the definition of Squicking). Maybe.

**Real Disclaimer:-** Today I feel like being offensive. It's fanfiction. You have been warned. Get over it.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

    
    **TENCHI'S HALLOWEEN HORROR**
    or
    **TENCHI MASAKI AND THE BEAST FROM BRICHESTER!**
    or
    _Tenchi's sexually charged telepathically induced hallucination of DEATH!_
    

Welcome, dear reader, to a terrifying tale of sexual debauchery and lies - which hark back through numerous generations of inbreeding and blood-rituals. A disgusting story of horror and violence and creatures from beyond the very walls of our existence and the 'other place'. In part, you are now privy to enter...

A) Jerry Springer  
or  
B) THE TWILIGHT ZONE!!!!1!111!!!

Our story begins on the FIloaeg\xc,...

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T_here is nothing wrong with your personal computer. _

_Do not attempt to adjust the picture. _

_We are controlling transmission. _

_If we wish to make it louder, we will bring in Ryoko. _

_If we wish to make it softer, we will whip Sasami. _

_We can reduce the focus to a soft blur, or sharpen it to crystal clarity. _

_We will control the horizontal. L.i.k.e. s.o._

_We will control the  
v  
e  
r  
t  
i  
c  
a  
l  
. _

_For the next read, sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear. _

_You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to..._

_BRICHESTER.... SEVERN VALLEY!_

In my tortured ears there sounds unceasingly a nightmare whirring and flapping, and a faint distant baying as of some multitude of beasts. It is not a dream - it is not, I fear, even madness - for too much has already happened to give me these merciful doubts. So I sit here and write and extrapolate upon these instances so that you may know the horrors that lurk and gibber and moan beyond the very edges of our world of sanity and that I, in some respite for my earlier sins, may die peacefully betwixt this moon's setting and to-morrow's sun's rise.  
It began sometime on this Hallow's Eve, as I was watching television alone and late while the other parties of the household slept in quiet, heavenly slumber. It goes without saying that my mind, belaboured by the day and beset by worries of a more meagre kind, drifted and was fixed upon this most wondrous of television programmes - a horrific tale of terror, teeming with the most morbid and grotesque sights one could imagine beyond the pale of human comprehension.  
Those fools! What were they thinking! Michael Jordan cannot act! _SPACE JAM_ is a sham travesty!

Nonetheless, however, that whilst I was locked in morbid fascination upon this wickedness, far more devious and deadly actions were being taken upon by unorthodox others. By unorthodox, I of course mean 'EVIL' and 'DARK' and all manner of other adjectives that dictate a despicable kind of horror upon this speck Earth, lingering on the intergalactic road-map like a dust-blot.

The third quarter finished at approximately half-past eleven and I was soon nodding off, like one of those dogs you find in the backs of cars. But just as my mind began to reel I was hooked by an advertisement. A man, dressed in suit and smiling widely, spoke: "Hi." And then, "Let's talk about diarrhoea."  
"Okay," I replied, intrigued.  
"Do you suffer from diarrhoea?" he solicited me.  
Now, please do not think me strange already. It was late and my mind was lost amongst a fugue of untimely (and dare it be said, titillating) thoughts and I replied to the affirmative. "Yes," said I. Which was true, to be sure, as I had eaten far too much the previous day and my bowels professed to be quite well and truly unstuck when it came to solids. Hardly solids in fact, considering the insidious splashes and watery noises that proved to explode from my very backside during the earlier hours of the afternoon.  
But I digress, the brunt of this story is not scatological references but rather the horror that befell me and the house that I live in.

Let me explain in a fashion beyond this 1920s, pseudo-pretentious, first-person preamble...

Tenchi Masaki sat on the sofa, his eyes glued to the flickering incandescence of the television screen. Why go out when one can have a sanitised version of the world squeezed into your brain with the electronic, radio-wave version of a bicycle pump? Why make friends when the Box Of Mystery (TM) sits in the corner of the room and beams wondrous images onto the retinas of your orbs which rest in the sockets of your face of your skull? It was a question, he decided, that only the philosophers would answer.  
"Yes," he answered the man in the suit.  
The man grinned exceptionally widely, like a vermicious knid after a suitably screaming meal. "Well, my name's Karl Nithotep, and I've come to Japan to sell my patented '_Diarrhoea B-Gone_' formula. It worked in America, with a 100% cure rate! Best of all, it's FREE! Satisfaction guaranteed or triple your money back! We'd provide testimonials from satisfied users, but all of them have died!"  
"Wow," said Tenchi.

And it's then that the _HORROR BEGAN!_

** *** WARNING !!! - MOTHERS WITH SENSITIVE OR NEUROSTATIC CHILDREN MAY WISH TO READ THE FOLLOWING NARRATIVE FIRST AND THEN OMIT THOSE SCENES THAT MAY PROVE DISTRESSING OR OTHERWISE DEBILITATING TO THEIR YOUNGSTERS *****

A terrifying crash, like the very doors of HADES ITSELF! had been thrown asunder, rang throughout the house. The television fell over! A ferocious shattering noise, and Tenchi stood suddenly as the living room's windows cracked and imploded one after another. Fragments of spinning glass cut scything arcs across the room like little glass scythes. A whipping roar and wind spat into the room like the devil's breath tossing and tearing at the curtains and that which wasn't pinned down. Pictures on the mantelpiece scattered like confetti; Tenchi's clothes whipped about in a flurry. And then a roar... a preternatural roar - like an express-train amplified a thousand-fold echoed throughout the house. One of Nobuyuki's statues (a resin model of a nude Sailor Moon) floated upwards from its 'hiding place' between the record-player and the vinyl Beatles EPs to scratch itself across the wall, etching a faint tearing line. It dropped to the floor with a clatter. Then with a great sucking noise, like a toothless old man sucking on a gobstopper, the wind vanished.  
Silence reigned.   
"Nooo!" cried Tenchi, sobbing gently and cradling the broken television. "My only love..."

Tenchi was still sniffling when the other inhabitants of the house arrived in the front room. Ayeka, Ryoko, Sasami, Mihoshi... they stood and watched the dejected boy hugging the cathode tube to his bosom.  
"Tenchi, I heard you calling for me!" cried Ryoko.  
"I think he might have been calling for me... actually," replied Ayeka, her head raised high. "It's quite presumptuous of you to assume that if he uses the word '_love_' it includes you in some way."  
"No, no," sobbed Tenchi uncontrollably. "The television... the television!" He gripped it tighter. Everybody else in the room looked at him.

This could, of course, have gone rather badly if it weren't for the blood-curdling scream of pure unadulterated terror that ripped through the chill night air. The clattering foot-steps skittered down the stairs and Nobuyuki appeared in the living room doorway, white as a sheet and nearly as soft. His mouth opened and shut like a goldfish's, jowls wobbling lightly in the twilight of the room, and he pointed at the shattered glass and fractured equipment.  
"The... the... the..." he stammered wildly, "The Sign! The portent of my doom!" He clawed at his face and ran, screaming, back upstairs.

"Well," said Tenchi, cocking an eyebrow and dusting himself of glass fragments. "I've seen a lot of strange things around here, but that's one of the strangest."  
"I've never seen a man jiggle so much," said Mihoshi. She smiled blissfully - rerunning that sight through her mind's eye.  
"In any case, what could have scared him so much?" asked Ayeka. "It's not as if... Oh."

Because now the quintet saw what Nobuyuki had seen. The Sailor Moon statuette had etched a grim message into the wall with its pointed plastic nipples... "!!!RED RUM" it read. 

**_"!!!RED RUM"_**

Tenchi found Nobuyuki in his bedroom, packing his carry-all with the necessities of travel - mouth wash, razors, deodorant, pr0n magazines, a packet of chocolate chip cookies and, most importantly, his passport.  
"What's going on, Dad?" asked Tenchi. "What's all this about?"  
"I have to leave, Tenchi."  
"But why?"  
"It's important that I leave the country tonight." The older man turned to him and for the first time in his life, Tenchi saw the age-lines and the dried spittle around his father's mouth. "Promise me you'll screw one of the girls."  
"Eww! Dad!"  
Nobuyuki launched himself at him, grabbing his son around the knees. "Oh Tenchi! Promise me! Please, make your father proud! Do all of them! Take them all!"  
"You've reading hentai doujinsho again, haven't you?" cried Tenchi, trying to pry his father off his kneecaps.  
"I can't tell you my son! The curse upon this household is too strong! You're too young to know of it!"  
Tenchi stopped struggling. "What do you mean: 'curse'?"

"It all started twenty years ago," began Nobuyuki, sitting on the only remaining chair in the living room. The rest were piled up in the middle of room and burning nicely. Shadows flickered malevolently about his face. "I was younger then. At least three times as young as I am now and I did not have the wisdom I have today.  
"Your mother, Tenchi - her name was Kiyone, but for the sake of argument I called her Achika - she wanted a nice house to live in. A house with running water, and a dog, and windows. But I was nothing but a simple architect and part-time manga artist for Young King Ours." He sighed wistfully.  
"So I took jobs where I could find them. Then one day I was hired by an American named Louis Schyfer. He asked me to design a mausoleum for his dead grandfather. Rumour has it that this grandfather of his was a necromantic demon-worshipper, but as I said - times were tough. This actually has nothing to do with the story, but anyway - twenty years ago, I was hired by a multi-millionaire magnate to build a hotel. A massive hotel. A hotel that would outshine all the other hotels in the world. Twenty years ago, I was hired to build that hotel up _there_ - on the mountain overlooking our house! However, the millionaire was a cruel man and I warned him that the land was a burial ground for Sioux Indians!"  
"What the fudge are you talking about?" asked Tenchi. "There aren't any Sioux Indians in Japan!"  
"They emigrated. Anyway, our employer carried on with the work and dug up the bodies, and in doing so angered the spirits. I was so foolish, I went along with it. The money! It was so much for me and Achika..." He broke down, his chest heaving in great tired sobs.  
"By Tsunami!" said Ayeka. "That's horrible!"  
"And now the evil spirits are after you?" asked Sasami. She grabbed Nobuyuki's hand. "Oh honourable father, that's so horrible!"  
Tenchi's lip quivered. "Oh, Dad! The spirits can't be so harsh on you. You were paid to do it!"

"Well," said Nobuyuki, between great wracking gasping breaths, "That and the fact I got to keep the Indians' babies' skulls as door handles."

"Wait a minute!" Ryoko floated forward. "There's no hotel up on the mountain!"  
Nobuyuki sniffled. "Exactly. Exactly. You see, after we built it and the first people occupied it, a terrible fire ripped through - killing everyone! A fire without a cause... well, that's what the police said. I managed to hide the blueprints which showed my shoddy wiring... but the acrid stench of scorched and martyred dead people lingered in my mind and nose for many weeks. Then, the curse began.  
"It started with the multi-millionaire magnate who hired me. He jumped from a window into his back-garden, where while he lay bleeding and crippled he was eaten by his pet dogs. The police put it down to a suicide. But those who worked on the hotel knew what it was... it was THE CURSE!"  
He rose, his eyes glowing faintly as the fire's sparks spattered.  
"As time passed, each man who worked on the hotel died in some mysterious horrible way. The foreman was the second; he'd quit his job and taken up work in a whiskey plant. He drowned in whiskey after he slipped and fell into one of the giant vats... they tried to save him, but he valiantly fought them off. The tea boy - he hideously brutally decapitated himself while combing his hair, and the plumber went bankrupt before dying along with the rest of his family in a terrible barbecue accident. Soon they were all dead. Apart from me.  
"But one thing was in common in each death. All of them had seen the hotel a few hours before they died."

"Well, that's easy enough to solve," said Tenchi. "All we need to do is stop you from seeing it."  
"Yes, exactly. That's why I'm going to put this blindfold on and I'm going to get you to drive me to the airport."

He held up the piece of black cloth and a pencil. "In the event that I accidentally lose the blindfold, Tenchi, I want you to poke my eyes out with the pencil."  
"Right-on!" cried Ryoko. She grabbed the pencil and waved it about menacingly.

**_SOME MINUTES LATER_**

Ayeka sighed and stared at Nobuyukui, who was clawing at his eyes and gurgling horribly. It had all been going so well! They'd managed to get him out to the car, walking him inch by painful inch up to the people-carrier. Even blind however, it was obvious that Nobuyuki was a trained groper. His hands wandered where no other's hands would wander and in ways that hinted at some dark and spell-binding sentience on their part. After the third tweak of Ayeka's breast and the second accidental fumble with Ryoko's backside there had been a concession to leave him to Tenchi. After that he'd tripped over a root and managed to grasp Ayeka's thighs as he tried to stand. It was most strange, really.  
But finally they'd got him to the car and he'd scrabbled with the car's door-handle. Failing to find it, he'd then raised the blindfold a little to see what he was doing. Thereupon he had ululated in a manner most distressing and began attempting to gouge his eyes out with his fingernails.  
"Hey!" Ryoko pointed. "He's spoiling it! He's not letting me use the pencil!"

Tenchi was by his father's side quicker than an Ethiopian gets at a free food-sample stand in a shopping mall. "Dad!" He grabbed his father's hands and dragged them away from his face. "What's wrong? WHAT'S WRONG?"  
"The... the hotel..." gasped Nobuyuki, the thin lacerations around his sockets slick and red.  
"I don't see it." Tenchi stood up and looked around. "Do any of you see it?"  
The girls scanned the mountainous, wooded horizon.

Mihoshi failed to suppress a loud gasp. "Over there!" She pointed with her hand, sending her breasts jiggling beneath her pink cardigan.  
Sasami followed her lead. "No, Mihoshi. That's the moon."  
"Oh... heh... yeah." She giggled nervously, setting her perky bosoms wobbling yet again.

CHECKLIST FOR HORROR CLICHÉS SO FAR:  
1) Attractive Persons? [ X ]  
2) Wobbling Breast? [ X ]  
3) Loadsa Virgins? [ X ]  
4) Hardcore Sex? [ ]  
5) ZOMMMBIES? [ ]

"I've got a bad feeling about all of this," said Ryoko.  
Mihoshi gave her a funny look. "Oh come on, Ryoko. Why do you always have to be such a spoilsport? I mean, the moon's out! We're in good company! It's a beautiful night!" She smiled at the group. "Is it just me or is it really, incredibly hot right now? Say, do you wanna go skinny-dipping?"  
"Oh... If only I had eeeyyyeeessss..." gurgled Nobuyuki, crawling limply about the clearing.  
"You do have eyes, now stop being such a big girl's blouse," Ayeka snapped. She went to help him - then thought better of it. Red didn't go well with purple, after all and she'd just get stains on her kimono. With another sigh she looked at the car and saw...

The Hotel.

Well, not exactly. It was actually its reflection in the car's door-handle. She blinked a couple of times just to make sure it wasn't the effects of an aneurysm or brain cancer, and then looked again. Yes, there was the definitely the reflection of The Hotel in its chrome finish.  
She turned around.

The Hotel stood behind them, its DARK facade overlooking them, its fire-gutted structure bearing down on them like a leering skull. Ravaged windows stared upon them like long dead sockets - mocking. Grotesque. The stairs leading up to the entrance like some obsidian tongue leading to a yawned chasm maw.  
"Well what are the chances of that?" laughed Mihoshi. "We didn't bother to look behind us!"  
Sasami ran her hand down her face and sagged. "This is seriously going to insult our readers' intelligence."  
"OH LOOK! A QUARTER!" Mihoshi cried. Oh, and her large breasts - unconfined by a bra, but tightly squeezed beneath the scratchy material of the fleece, itched and begged to be released. And longed to be touched... by hands that were far from human.  
And within that cluttered and bubbly mind, subconscious and altogether evil thoughts began to stir.

* * * * *

_Somewhere in the outer reaches of space-time, a glittering meteorite of purest gold sped towards a tiny and insignificant town in an insignificant country on an insignificant planet._

Our heroic Investigators stood in front of The Hotel and looked at it. A crippled, blackened sign hung above the door - it's bleeding paint chipped and cracked like an old prostitute's lipstick. "THE IL PALAZZO HOTEL"  
read Sasami slowly, pointing at each letter in turn.  
"The Il Palazzo Hotel?" repeated Tenchi. "_The The Palace_? What sort of idiot puts 'the' before a foreign word denoting 'the'?"  
"Shut up Tenchi, you prick!" snapped Nobuyuki. "We have to get inside and find a way to stop me dying!"

Ryoko, however, was a little surprised by this. "Go inside? A minute ago you were filling your briefs because we might see it. Now you want us to go in there?!" She indicated the charbroiled ruin, which did the architectural equivalent of whistling nonchalantly.  
"Exactly, sweet cakes," replied Nobuyuki. "The Hotel's trying to scare us away from looking at it so that I die in some horrible, horrible way! There's got to be a reason for it doing that!" And with that, he charged inside - booting the charcoal door aside like matchwood.  
"He seems sort of different somehow," Mihoshi stated, running a hand through the beautiful silk blonde curls on her head. "And does anyone mind if I take this cardigan off?"

Off in the distance, out in the woods a wolf howled plaintively.

"You are quite correct, Mihoshi," said a voice from the darkness. The now quartet of Investigative Aliens spun around at the voice. Standing in the copse of trees, eyes glowing, was something human-like.  
"AAAAH!" yelped Mihoshi. "It's a mysterious voice!"  
"Indeed it is," said the Mysterious Voice. "Although many know me as..." The ghastly shape stepped from the shadows and into the moonlight. "... Grandfather Katsuhito Masaki."  
Tenchi breathed a sigh of relief, his hands having reached for his 'sword' when the Mysterious Voice had spoken. "Thank God it's you, Grandpa. If we had half a brain we'd have realised it was you simply you from the fact nobody in their right mind would wander around these woods dressed in their pyjamas!"  
"This is a Shrine Uniform. And stop playing with yourself." The elderly priest pushed his glasses further up his nose. "It is quite true that Nobuyuki has changed somewhat. It is the fire that burns in his belly and the fear that burns in his loins that force him to act so rashly."  
"It's just..." Ayeka looked from Katsuhito back to the now wide open Hotel door. "... so out of character for him to do something like that."  
"Do not be surprised if many of us appear out of character," said Katsuhito sagely. "Strange times are upon us. It is not every day that our pasts catch up with us so readily."  
Ryoko pulled a face. "Er... you said 'pasts'; as in plural."  
"Yes. I did - because it is not only Nobuyuki who will face his curse today. I too must face a horror of my own creation... and so too must Tenchi."  
Tenchi blanched: "But I-"  
"SHUT UP! ... As I was saying; A terrible heritage has been placed upon this family. One by which only a dowry of blood will repay the debt. Nobuyuki caused the hideous, burning, fiery deaths of many innocent people and made the bodily parts of dead Indians into furniture pieces. I... have my own reasons. And Tenchi has, through no fault of his own, had not one but _ten_ different curses placed on his head for numerous reasons that I won't go into, even though I know they were all my fault."  
"Um," said Tenchi.  
"Even more grave, an inheritance of pure terror courses through his veins... a haemoglobin of unbridled, unchained deviancy, so strong that I have frequently wondered whether to kill him during our nightly training bouts."  
"Uh?" said Tenchi.  
"If only my wandering eye had not dipped so far..." He sighed. "The sins of the fathers are the hardest to bear."  
"What the - ?"

"Nonetheless, our source of salvation lies within that festering hell-hole of Nobuyuki's design. Let us put an end to our demons."

* * * * *

Twenty years ago The Hotel's foyer had been beautiful. Now it was nothing but a shell of its former life. Burnt tables and chairs were scattered about the room beneath piles of thick, choking ash. The reception desk beneath the overhanging balcony and its twin staircase had melted somewhat. Dotted here and there were some pieces of its former glory; the gold-plated clock that used to sit on the wall above one of the plush sofas... a plush sofa now nothing but a skeleton... and a skeleton, that had once been a valet.  
As the quintet entered, one of the sets of elevator doors at the back of the room closed with an exceptionally loud '_TING!_" and a shuddering movement of its pointer, clicking up from "L" to "1" then "2" then "3" and so on.  
While Ryoko prodded the long defunct hotel employee with a stick, the others pondered on the next course of action.  
"It seems Nobuyuki has gone on ahead," said Katsuhito. "We can only hope that he doesn't run into too much trouble."  
From the other side of the room Ryoko shouted. "HEY! You guys! Look at this!" She waved the grinning valet's skull about, snapping its mouth open and closed with enthusiasm. "_Alas poor Nobuyuki, I knew him well!_"  
"Oh for goodness sake Ryoko!" Ayeka ran over and snatched the skull away from her. "How would you like it if it was your skull?"  
"I dunno. I'm immortal."

Mihoshi stared at the dead valet for a long while, chin rested on her hand. When she was sure no one was looking she grabbed one of his picked-clean leg bones and hid it down her trouser leg.

"Perhaps we should look about the place," said Sasami. She turned to Katsuhito. "Shouldn't we, honourable Grandfather?"  
"Yes..." Katsuhito's eyes squinted in the darkness. "Yes. That might be necessary."

* * * * *

217 - No por mucho madrugar amanece más temprano - No por mucho madrugar amanece más temprano - No por mucho madrugar amanece más temprano - No por mucho madrugar amanece más temprano - No por mucho madrugar amanece más temprano - No por mucho madrugar amanece más temprano - No por mucho madrugar amanece más temprano - No por mucho madrugar amanece más temprano - No por mucho madrugar amanece más temprano - No por mucho madrugar amanece más temprano - No por mucho madrugar amanece más temprano - No por mucho madrugar amanece más temprano - No por mucho madrugar amanece más temprano - No por mucho madrugar amanece más temprano - 217

"ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY!" sang Nobuyuki as he traipsed the fire-scorched corridors, bouncing the tennis ball as he went.

* * * * *

The hardboard trapdoor in the kitchen opened faster and more smoothly than Ryoko's legs after an all night drink-binge, and the odour of stale air and something more peculiar drifted out from the hole it left in the tiled floor. (I'm sorry, but no matter how easily I could make a joke bringing together Ryoko and smells, I shall abstain.)  
Tenchi led the way, carrying the flaming torch he had made from the cloth of his trouser leg bound about the valet's arm. The shadows receded, pushed back by the blazing light of justice. Like treacle. Or black milk. It swam away from them like a living, aqueous creature.  
Nobody noticed the way it bubbled and oozed viscously, rolling lazily as it did so.

Underneath The Hotel the catacombs lay, drilled through the rock and granite of the mountain and turned into miles of tunnels. MILES OF TUNNELS! The investigative five threw up their hands in wonderment and danced merry little jigs of astoundingness as they surveyed this Ninth Wonder Of The World.  
"I thought this was built on an Indian burial site," said Ayeka, rather out of breath after her unfeminine boogie.  
Katsuhito nodded. "It was. But we no longer reside in the land of man. We reside in the land... of the dead!"  
They all thought about that.  
"Switzerland," said Mihoshi.  
"No." Katsuhito readjusted his glasses. "And my Power-Scanner (i.e. my brain) tells me that we should investigate that door..." He pointed. "THERE!"

So they did.

* * * * *

Nobuyuki was not - as he had expected - making a wonderful time of it. He was lost. And cold. And something had eaten his shoe.  
He wasn't too sure what it was that had eaten his shoe, but it was definite that something really had eaten his shoe. Tongue, laces, leather and all.  
He'd rather liked that shoe.

He'd picked the pair up cheap at a cut-down shoe-shop / brothel in Hong-Kong during a business / pleasure trip for work. But of the two, that was his favourite shoe. There was something un-uniformly excellent about it. Like sometimes, when he was standing outside Tenchi's school - on those few rare days when the bus was late, and he'd stand there... in the rain... watching the girls walk past. They didn't see him of course, because he hid in the bushes next to the gate. But the fact remained; he'd stand and watch - taking in every little nuance of them, checking the shape and contours, tracing them with his eyes... gently... ever so gently... the fact that they had their jackets undone usually, their white shirt-blouses open to the elements... and where the rain fell they would begin to cling slightly, and they'd brush their hands against the soft material...  
rubbing it... rubbing it onto their flesh so that it stuck and that it became ever more translucent and so that he could see their firm young steps into proper womanhood... just like he had done so many years before... O' he knew what they were going through...  
But even so, his eyes would bore into theirs (though they would not know it) through the breaks in the shrubbery and he would let his gaze lower itself... down... past the firm midriff - where the wet, see-through nylon clung to their shapely hips and waist and the moist droplets... trickled... and then onto the skirt... and sometimes, when it was REALLY WET...

Yes. He'd really liked that shoe.

Stumbling about the corridors, he paused for a moment to catch his breath and attempt to get his bearings. Nope. It was no good. He was well and truly lost. Which was a bit annoying, seeing as he'd built it and all.  
He turned back towards the elevator...  
And it went _"TING!"_...

Its door, burnished beaten brass creaked open, and out of it... out of it... a stinking wave of blood! Thick and warm, some of its top-most parts already congealing into a browny-black crust of flakes that shattered as the wave toppled from the elevator and flooded outwards to sweep down the hall. Nobuyuki stood in the centre of the maelstrom, top-most lip curled in disgust, as it rushed past him - splashing up his shirt and trousers. It reached up to his ankles. A red, watery soup.  
The elevator doors shut with a _"TING!"_.

"That's funny," he said after a while, "The lift door's supposed to stay open for _twenty-five_ seconds."

From somewhere far off in The Hotel, a wolf howled plaintively.

* * * * *

_**Meanwhile in the catacombs beneath the IL PALAZZO HOTEL!!!   
The Tenchi quartet (+ Katsuhito) had just stumbled upon what appeared to be a secret lair of some sort.**_

"It looks like we've stumbled upon a secret lair of some sort," said Ryoko.

Indeed, it did look like such a place what with the large dining table ready to be seated for 12, the silver cutlery and the glass goblets, and the great tapestries hanging from the walls. Majestic majesty that hung about the place - along with a large red and black swastika banner.

Two men stood there... one a short man in a brown outfit, his hair in a laughable side-parting and a hairy slug under his nose. The other man wasn't actually standing, but was sitting on a chair. His gaunt, lean, bishounen figure seemed to leak loathing and distaste -lethally- at a hundred yards. His BLACK leather-coat and equally BLACK and floppy Witch-Finder General hat off-set his pale skin and BLACK eyeliner and lipstick. Which was, if you hadn't already guessed, BLACK.  
Oh, and at the back of the room was a glass-jar with a brain bobbing around in it.

The tooth-brush moustached man turned towards the intruders. "Vhat do you tink you are doing, Spions? Zis a secret lair for secret people."

He scanned the room slowly. Then stopped on Katsuhito. The thin lips twisted into a sneer. "So... ve meet again."  
Katsuhito nodded. "Yes. We do... Adolph."  
Everyone stood shocked as this sudden and altogether unexpected revelation occurred. Adolph Hitler stroked his chin thoughtfully for a moment and turned to the gaunt, BLACK hat wearing vampire beside him. "Aculardi... deal vith dese Juden filth, vile I deal vith dis hideously kontrived plot-device."  
And then he snapped his fingers.

**EXT. HIMALAYAN MOUNTAINS - DAY**

KATSUHITO stands on top of the snowy mount, his moustache collecting flakes of snow like a privet-hedge collects drunken lovers after a particularly heavy-going party. The wind howls and he turns, looking at where he is.

HITLER (O.S)  
_Are you lookink for me?_

Katsuhito spins around. HITLER is standing a few yards away, resting slavishly against a boulder. On top of the boulder is his BRAIN in the jar. It bubbles happily.

KATSUHITO  
_Yes. I was. So it seems we meet again - for the last time._

HITLER  
_Ja, Katsuhito. Or should I kall you... Otto Skorzeny?_

KATSUHITO  
_I've gone by many names, Adolph. Otto Skorzeny... Sir Walter Raleigh... John The Baptist..._

HITLER  
_Ach, that is so. But I fear it is time for ze obligatory flash-back to how ve know each uffer._

**~~~~~ OBLIGATORY FLASH-BACK ~~~~**

_The Hitler Bunker  
Berlin - 1945_

The doors to Hitler's personal chamber crashed open with a resounding thump and Otto Skorzeny, dressed in his SS regalia stepped in. "Mein Fuhrer, the Russians have entered the... Mein Gott! You're not sucking the spinal juices from that aborted foetus are you?!"  
Hitler hid the shrivelled cadaver behind his back. "Er... nein, nein. I vas only... er... kissing it."  
"You liar!" cried Skorzeny. "I saw your teeth!"  
"Ach, does it matter? It is only ein Juden baby!" He brought it out from behind his back and raised it to his lips once again.  
Skorzeny, however, fell to his knees. "Mein Gott... I never realised. After all this time..." He raised his eyes to the Fuhrer, who was cheerfully licking the limp cadaver's back. "You truly are a - _MONSTER!_"  
He drew his Luger. "After all these years I worked for you, Herr Hitler. But now the shackles of my mind are cast off and I understand; it was your mesmerising good looks and charm that brought me into your fold!"  
"Wha?" belched Hitler, his face covered in blood and sticky spinal liquids.  
"Die, Hitler... DIE!"  
He squeezed the trigger, sending a shot flying into Hitler's chest. But nothing happened. The ruler of the Reich laughed an uproarious laugh.  
"Ach, Otto. You haff verked out my secret. But you cannot defeat me. Look about you!"  
Skorzeny did so. Hitler, in all his evilness, was standing at the centre of a giant pentagram! And at each point there sat an SS WARRIOR MONK OF DEATH! meditating.  
"Soon I vill transcend ze barrier of space-time and become EIN GOTT!" cried Hitler maniacally. Even as he spoke, his body was growing incorporeal, swaying and taking on a bluish translucence. "My mass sacrifices in ze Concentration Camps haff given me the energy to become a new FOCUS on ze galactic stage! A NEW GOD!" he roared.  
"No! NO!" Skorzeny wailed. He pointed the pistol again and fired. But the ghostly Hitler was rising, RISING like a star falling backwards - up towards the ceiling.  
"JA!" gibbered the spectre. "Ja, I am becoming EIN GOTT! Skorzeny! I vill get you for your traitorishness! Auf widdershins!"

"Nooo!" screamed Skorzeny, beating his hands against the floor. His tear-stained face looked upwards towards the sight of the spectral feet vanishing through the ceiling. "I will kill you HITL~ER! Even if it is the last thing I do!"

~~~~** END FLASHBACK **~~~~

HITLER  
_So, Skorzeny. Show your true FORM!_

Katsuhito stands for a moment before raising his hands to his ears... then, with a quick TUG he pulls the two halves of him aside. His Katsuhito-suit falls away to reveal the younger form of SKORZENY!

SKORZENY  
_You're the first person to see me look like this in at least three months, Adolph. But I go by a new name now... Yosho.  
(BEAT)  
And Mary on Wednesdays._

HITLER  
_Ja. Vell. That is ze vay the cookie crumblez. But remember, back zen I vas ze master and you ze apprentice. But now... I AM ZE MASTER!_

SKORZENY  
_Nothing but a Master of Evil, Adolph!_

HITLER  
_Exactly! Now die!_

They FIGHT!

**_Meanwhile, in a secret lair beneath the IL PALAZZO HOTEL!_**  
A serious amount of vampiric ass-kicking was taking place. And by vampiric ass-kicking, I of course mean that the vampire was kicking some ass seriously. Or... serious... ass. Kicking serious ass? Kicking some... anyway -  
"You fill me with a never-ending melange of loneliness," said Aculardi, as he drop-kicked Ryoko through a handily placed break-away table.  
"I am adrift in an abyss of despair," he muttered as he back-handed Ayeka, sending her spinning through a senseless void of space.  
"Anne Rice is the embodiment of all that is truthfully sardonic in this world..." he raved, moping sadly in the corner, whittling away at his pathetic DARK life. "You norms understand nothing about the cruelty and angst that lurks within the souls of the human-kith, nor the endless and indefinable chains of the vampire heart."  
While the insane goth vampire angsted his little heart out, our heroes quickly regrouped.  
"What," asked Ryoko, "is he talking about?"  
"You mean it isn't alien?" asked Tenchi, surprised.

"LOOK AT ME! I'M CARVING MARILYN MANSON'S NAME INTO MY ARM WITH A RAZOR BLADE!"

"Why's he ignoring us?" asked Mihoshi. She scratched her head and stared at the black clad vampire's perverse art class. "I don't think he's very happy."  
Aculardi looked up at her. "Happy? You dare to speak to me about _happy_?!" He tossed the blood-stained safety-razor away and rose, his dark dress billowing about him like he had a hair-dryer shoved up his jacksie. "People misunderstand me, hate me, scare me. Nobody can relate to me! My unlife is an endless misery of solitude and despair, entwined within the blistered cartilage of bemoaned, agonising, velvet gloom."  
"But why?" demanded Sasami, her normally cheerful face set in a mask of shock. How could anyone not be happy? It boggled the mind. "There are such beautiful things! Trees, and flowers and animals!"  
"Animals? You dare speak to me of animals?!" His red-flecked eyes bore into her own. "I owned an animal once... a creature of such sordid schemes that it fled, fled to cause terror and wreak destruction upon any others!"  
Sasami blinked. "What was it?"  
"A rabbit."  
"A rabbit?" Tenchi rolled his eyes.  
"Ah! But not just _any_ rabbit. It was a DEVIL'S rabbit, with the shape of an ankh burned into its forehead and a spiked collar which it used to poke people in painful ways!"  
"Now you're just being silly," said Tenchi. "Really. A rabbit."

The vampire's eye twitched. "You dare to wax slurs against me; Aculardi - DARK Vampire of the DARK and DARK Lord of Misrule - Secret DARK Guard Of The DARK Nazi Fourth Reich?!" His glasses slid to the end of his nose. "Taste the wrath of DARK poetry, pathetic sheep!"

**EXT. HIMALAYAN MOUNTAINS - DAY**

Adolph Hitler and Katsuhito were trading ferocious blows. A lunging, spinning, kung-fu fight of death as they whirled and twirled like Catherine Wheels of frenzied combat about the thin-aired paradise of Mount Everest.

HITLER  
_National Socialist Strike!!_

Skorzeny/Katsuhito jumps as the spinning Swastika blows a crater into the side of the mountain, sending red-hot fragments of stone flying. He back-flips to land on both feet. 10s all round!

SKORZENY  
_Ha! You call that an attack, Hitler! I've had harder craps than you! Taste the wrath of the "Shinto Mega Punch"!_

Hitler ducks it.

HITLER  
_Shinto Mega Punch? HA! Taste ze power of the Hermann Goerring Blitzkrieg Upper-Cut!_

SKORZENY  
_Hermann Goerring Blitzkrieg Upper-Cut?! HA! I laugh at your fat, transvestite powered punch! Face the fury of "EXCEL NAD-KICK!!_

He crushes Hitler's remaining gonad beneath his shrine-sandal, while the ghostly Nazi leader is powering up his fearsome upper-cut attack. Hitler groans slightly, tears rolling down his cheeks.

HITLER  
_Ach! Mein Leiben! Unt my testicles! But even zough I feel faint, eat zis painful Headbutt Of Pain!_

He gives Skorzeny/Katsuhito a friendly Glasgow Kiss, fracturing the Priest's lower mandible and shattering his nose.

_**Still meanwhile, in a secret lair beneath the IL PALAZZO HOTEL!**_

"I call this poem... 'Alone In The Darkness'  
The night falls in a heavy, suffocating cloak, cold and alone are we.  
The emotion for which you sacrifice yourself  
flares once, then dies,  
devoured by a velvet ebon nothingness.  
All hope must sicken and die.  
  
Your soul thrives no more.  
How could you cause such agony?  
Our dark thoughts surround us, crying,  
We are fallen."

Aculardi spread his arms, his gloved hands upturned to the band of open-mouthed Investigators that stood before him. He sniffed loudly and rubbed at the single tear that rolled down his cheek. "So morbid," he whispered. "So beautiful." Then his gaze returned to them. "Do not force me to quoth you another piece of my soul, puny light-siders. My despair and feeling very sorry for myself goes even deeper than that bare speck I showed. An abyss from which even your cheerfulness might not be able to return."  
"Did you know that your poetry sucks serious ass?" asked Ryoko suddenly. "Good Goddess, I could pull a better poem outta my DELETED!"  
Tenchi took this moment to faint.  
"How's about this one for a poem?" asked the post-Space Pirate...

"You're a poser,  
Not a goth,  
Or a punk.  
You're a wannabe.  
You're not alone,  
You have Hot Topic,  
And the mall.  
Slowly destroying,  
A scene,  
That took years to build.  
You're worthless,  
Empty,  
Please go away.  
Stop playing White Wolf,  
And get a goddamn life."

There was a contemplative pause for thought.

"In that case," said Aculardi, "maybe I should kill you all and drain you of your delicious vitae!"  
"Oh, nice one Ryoko," snapped Ayeka, as the vampire stalked forward - his razor cut arm dripping his essence across the tiled floor.

**EXT. HIMALAYAN MOUNTAINS - DAY**

HITLER  
_Your powers are veak, Olt Mann!_

Bloodied, bowed but unbroken, Skorzeny/Katsuhito looks up through his shattered eye-socket at the practically untouched Adolph Hitler. A great weariness resides within his gut, but he cannot give up now.

SKORZENY  
_If you strike me down, Adolph, I will become more powerful than you could possible imagine._

HITLER  
_Zo you zay... PANZERKAMPFWAGONKOENIGSTIGERDEUTSCHJAEGERKULTURKAMPF!_

He THRUSTS his hands forward, and Skorzeny/Katsuhito's eyes open wide in surprise. Well, more pain actually, seeing as Adolph Hitler's hands piece straight through his chest and rip out of his back with a wet, sickening slosh. Internal organs explode outwards. The hands are removed, soaked in blood and bile, and Skorzeny/Katsuhito collapses to his knees before falling onto his back. His life pools around him, staining the snow.

SKORZENY  
_It... it... ends. I face... my demons..._

HITLER  
_Ja. It ends... It ends in a vay I did not vish for...  
(BEAT)  
My... my... Father._

SKORZENY  
_I... I forgive you - Son!_

HITLER  
_(raises head to the sky)  
FAAA~AAAATHEEE~EER!!!_

Skorzeny/Katsuhito's mouth opens and closes, a thin trickle of blood oozing from its corner - and then with a shallow cough, he dies. Hitler drops to his knees, tears streaming like waterfalls from his face to freeze into little icicles on his cheeks.

HITLER  
_Oh, Father... Oh... Father, vhy has thou forzaken me!  
(BEAT)  
And how int Gott's name am I meant to get off this verdammt mountain?_

* * * * * * * *

Now that you know our predicament in passing, it is perhaps time to return to the original narrative and explain in more detail the situation that had befallen us. O', if only I had known the terrors in store for us even now! I would surely have fled screaming into the night, gibbering and wailing like some unkempt blackguard and not the ceaselessly noble young gentleman that I am; Masaki Tenchi.  
But without my ego appearing too over-bearing, you must understand: my chastity and virtue has been kept, not by luck, but by certainly a strong sense of personal belonging and self-knowledge. It was this that was to falter so terribly as my tale continues. It becomes all to apparent to me now, that perhaps this was one of the curses that my forebear, now dead, warned me of. Anyway, I shall continue...

The vampiric beast, in all its blood-sucking splendour minced towards the party and me like a drunken homosexual. His movements were soft, clean and analytical - like a discotheque fiend sizing up a suitable sexual partner for the night. I can say, with all honesty, that if it were not for the fact I had voided myself before this adventure's beginning, I would likely have resulted in a brown-trouser situation of the most obvious kind.  
Ryoko, however, was not one to be scared by such overly feminine actions (after all, her masculinity is most palpable) and so she lunged at him, sending forth a flying kick of the most astounding grace that it caught the ferocious blood-sucking brute beneath the jaw, and conveyed it clean over the table and into a box full of old fruit.  
The vampire did not seem best pleased by this and turned into some sort of preternatural beast with more mouths than eyes, but more eyes than teeth and sort of galumphed its way over to Ryoko and tossed her about like a lump of weightless concrete.  
Ayeka, being Ayeka and probably romantically involved with Ryoko - as we know all such "Royal women" are - jumped in, using her head as a sort of impromptu battering ram. The attack forced Aculardi (the vampiric beast I mentioned earlier) to release Ryoko's breasts and disentangle itself from her... a manner of thing I think should be best left to your imagination. Dear reader, for the life of me I cannot describe to you the shouts of joy and excitement and arousal that Ryoko did raise as that gothic parahuman did return to his more sightly form and, nearly naked, start punching her repeatedly in the face with a wine-glass.  
But I digress of the point.  
Mihoshi entered around this moment, waving about what appeared to be a stick - but later turned out to be a severed human leg. I, of course, was far too busy noting these events down in explicit, Edwardian dialect to even contemplate the thought of joining this fracas - and Sasami was standing stock-still obviously too terrified by the events occurring. Sensing this, I hid behind her - only peaking out when the splatters of blood and screams of pain became less prominent.

But our fight was in vain. Aculardi, damn his undead hide! was gaining the upper-hand. Even against Ryoko, that extraterrestrial fighter, he was winning - pummelling her cheerful face into the stone floor with a table-leg and stamping on her neck with bone-crunching force. I was beginning to weigh up the prospects of surrendering and throwing myself on the brute's mercy, when suddenly the doors we had entered by swung open with such force and with such a bang, that my bowels - which I thought empty - moved unceremoniously and resulted in a most embarrassing nervous reaction.

It was Washu. Washu - that woman; that girl, who resided in our broom-cupboard. Washu - that teenage mother and spiky-haired seductress, mother of Ryoko (who was at this moment screaming orgasmically as Aculardi twisted her arms around her neck and tied them into a pretzel-like knot) and holder of my heart.  
Which reminded me... this atomic pace-maker she had given me was really not cutting it.

In one hand, she carried a book. Thick bound and dusty, a pentagram and skull etched into its human-flesh cover like a Forbidden Book-Of-The-Month Club give-away. Aculardi glanced at her as she stood, legs astride, in that strange foreign garb.  
"Oh this eternal anguish grows greater with every transient minute," he growled - teeth pointed and red.  
Washu opened the book slowly, her gaze never leaving the beast.   
"Was Du heute kannst besorgen, das verschiebe nicht auf Morgen!" she cried, her hand raised in the dreaded Voorish sign.

That roar! That dark, unhallowed roar! Aculardi's mouth opened like a hinged door, tongue slavering, teeth glinting and his eyes - Dear God, reader! Those eyes! - like rubies drenched in blood! Then, and I tell no lies, please, take my word for this, a swirley-thing appeared above him.  
He was lifted - lifted exactly like how we described Hitler floating away as a ghost a minute ago. Arms outstretched, gropingly, trying to seek solace and something to grab onto. But Ryoko was not there! HA! The monstrosity was finished! And as he howled curses about how 'really horrible' his life was and that 'no one understood him' he began to disappear into the swirling... swirley... thing.  
And with one last soul-chilling cry he vanished.  
"**_TETSUO!_**"  
How horrid a fate, even for one such as he. But we were safe, and that was all that mattered.

And now for a musical interlude by Mr. Warren Vanderbeak and Sgt. Ivor Biggun, Wales' two most prolific serial-killers, catamites and song-writers:

**___________________________**

** MUSICAL INTERLUDE  
**___________________________

All things dull and ugly,  
All creatures short and squat,  
All things rude and nasty,  
The Lord God made the lot.

Each little snake that poisons,  
Each little wasp that stings,  
He made their brutish venom.  
He made their horrid wings.

All things sick and cancerous,  
All evil great and small,  
All things foul and dangerous,  
The Lord God made them all.

Each nasty little hornet,  
Each beastly little squid--  
Who made the spiky urchin?  
Who made the sharks? He did!

All things scabbed and ulcerous,  
All pox both great and small,  
Putrid, foul and gangrenous,  
The Lord God made them all.

Amen.

___________________________

AND NOW BACK TO OUR ADVERTISED FEATURE: "**THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL**"

Klatuu stood on the UFO's door ramp, staring at the assorted crowd. "Your choice is simple. Join us and live in peace or pursue your present course and face obliteration. We shall be waiting for your answer. The decision rests with you."

THE END

"Washu!" Ryoko grinned through her chipped, shattered teeth, blood and vomit trickling down her chin.  
"Oh my daughter!" Washu cried. She tossed the dreaded book "Unausprechen Kulten" aside. "Oh Ryoko!"  
From somewhere in the distance, a string-quartet of violas began to play a soft dirge. A song, hymn, a soliloquy of rekindled understanding and love... how long had the two quarrelled, no one could know truly. After all Kagato's doings, it was now - now that the debt to each other had been repaid - that they could return to being mother and daughter.  
Their curse was finished.

"AAAARRRRGGGGGHHHH!" screamed Ayeka, as she was slowly dragged into the swirley-thing feet first.  
"Oh Tsunami no!" Sasami continued for her. "That swirley-thing is eating my sister!"

The others raced to her side almost instantaneously, but not. Tenchi reached her first. Ayeka was now up to her neck... everything beneath it vanished into the sucking, swirley mass. He grabbed one of her flailing arms, holding it tightly.  
The viola players, sensing they were a little bit out of touch right now, decided to slip off and play a gig somewhere else.

"Tenchi..." Ayeka's eyes wavered uncontrollably. "I'm... I'm so sorry."  
Tenchi clenched her more tightly, their fingers meshing. "Sorry? Sorry for what?" He watched as the swirley-thing reached her chin. She raised her head, trying to keep it above the flow.  
"I... love you Tenchi," she spat, waggling her head from side to side, trying to keep the swirley-thing from covering her mouth. "But... but I was afraid to tell you Tenchi. I was-"  
Her mouth vanished, but her eyes - bright and shiny and fearful - watched him as the mass slowly continued its trudge up to her nose.  
Tenchi's lip quivered. "No, Ayeka... No!" He tugged on her arm as the bridge of her nose finally vanished. "If only I'd tried pulling you out sooner, you might still be able to talk to me!"  
Ayeka blinked, once- twice- three times and then her eyes vanished. Only her forehead and her forelocks showing. And her arm, which Tenchi was desperately tugging on.  
Slowly, even that disappeared - up to her elbow - but Tenchi still held on. His face puckered like a bulldog drinking vinegar.  
"Tenchi," said Washu, "you have to let her go."  
"No." Tenchi looked around at them. "I can't..." He sniffled. "It's eating my hand too."

His right-hand, fingers still locked with Ayeka's, vanished into the mist. Then, with one last caress of her hand within that obscene portal - removed his hand.  
"Hey! You took your hand out!" snapped Ryoko.  
"Yes." Tenchi didn't look at her. "True love does that to you."  
"Uh?"  
"You wouldn't understand." He stood up. "Ayeka is dead. She sacrificed her life so that Aculardi could be killed."  
"No she didn't. Washu zapped him with a funky disco-light effect."  
"Exactly."

The swirley-thing finished its swirling and collapsed in on itself with a sound like a thousand hands going _"CLAP!"_ and a faint far off cry - a womanly cry - that sounded like "_Nabe~Shiiin!_"

** SOMEWHERE IN THE IL PALAZZO HOTEL...**

Nobuyuki stopped outside the last door on the storey. His trousers were still sticky with blood. With careful deliberation he raised the axe and brought it down on the door, smashing it again and again against the timber. The metal number "217" nailed to it flew off and floated around the corridor for a while before turning into a goldfish and diving into the wall - ripples spreading from the epicentre of the fish's entrance.  
"HEY, SWEDEN!" he bellowed through the hole he'd made and then peered in, grinning.

The teenage girl sitting on the bed looked up at him startled, the book in her hands falling limply to the ground.  
"Like the book?" asked Nobuyuki.  
The girl seemed puzzled for a moment. "I love it."  
"Good. Then this shouldn't come as a surprise."

Then he cut her head off.

* * * * *

My only love was dead. Drawn into a swirley-thing from which nothing could escape. Washu explained to me the details; the swirley-thing was not a swirley-thing at all but a time-gate. A portal through whence space-time and time-space were singularly devoid and meaningless. A place where nothing was real and everything was in reality. A reality were everything didn't have a place but was quite, quite real.  
Oh, my mind stumbled. So many blows in so short a time. Sasami was shocked... horrified. But as she said; "My sister has been sucked into a time-space swirley-thing but I'm determined to remain optimistic, no matter what." That and the fact Washu had brought Ryo-Ohki with her proved to raise her spirits. But I myself was distraught. I loved Ayeka as much as I loved Ryoko. Perhaps even equally. And her loss struck a chord deep within my very soul.  
The only thing that could tide me over was the fact that we were related by blood... and therefore it wouldn't have worked out anyway. Not unless we wanted freak-babies.

~~~~~~~~

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~~~~~~~~ 

Tenchi wept for his lost love as they left the secret lair, wandering the tunnels and catacombs of this strange - extra-normal - landscape. Somewhere along the line they'd lost Mihoshi, but there were too many thoughts lying heavy in their mind to worry about that. Surely the Galaxy Police officer's insane good luck would lead her to safety. Or she would slowly starve to death, her once fine figure wasting away into a tired, pot-bellied shadow of its former self. The skin cracking and peeling, malnutrition rotting the gums so that they bled and shrank, teeth rattling loosely and the skin around the eyes growing more drawn and wrinkled with each passing hour. Her fingernails would grow longer as the skin receded and the chapped lips would tear open like over-ripe fruit.  
Yes, thought Ryoko, that'd teach her a thing or two about looking at her man. Trying to steal him away from her, would she? HA! Death was too good for her. As she thought this she stroked the valet's skull lovingly.  
"Yes," whispered the cracked old thing in a voice dry and brittle and only she could hear. "Yes, my love, we must lead them to the shrine cave, so that they can die... and we can be together. For-ever."  
Ryoko made a feral grin, and her eyes half-lidded in pleasure as the skull hugged her tighter - pressing into her side. 

"Uh, Ryoko..." asked Sasami, "why are you stroking that skull like that?"  
"Because."  
Sasami frowned. "Because?"  
"Exactly." 

From somewhere far off in the catacombs, a wolf howled plaintively. 

They turned a corner in this strange, winding labyrinth to find themselves in some sort of circular central chamber. Around it were various tunnels leading off. And doors. All different types of doors. Big doors. Little doors. Green doors. Red doors. Black doors. Metal doors. Wooden doors. Doors with paint on them. Doors that were just unsanded wood. Doors with handles. Doors without handles.  
"Wow... it's like a house of doors!" cried Sasami. 

And then, with a petrifying crash, one of the doors (a blue one with copper finish to be exact) was flung open and a dark, shadowy shape stood in its opening.  
"Grandfather!" cried Tenchi. The injured man stepped in as the door slammed shut, and Tenchi ran to his side. "Wait. You're not Grandfather! You're an impostor!"  
"No, Tenchi," the young man in the shrine outfit said. The spider-web of cracks across his glasses lenses reflected the artificial spotlights that illuminated the room from just off-screen. "I am Katsuhito... in my true form. As Otto Skorzeny!"  
"GASP!" gasped Tenchi, letting go of the man and letting him hit the floor with a clattering splodge.  
"So Otto, you finally show yourself," Washu muttered. She knelt next to him. "If we get you back to my lab we could-"  
A bloodied hand reached for her arm. "No... no. I don't need much longer. I just need to tell Tenchi."  
"Tell me what?" 

"Tenchi - there's so much I kept hidden from you. All this time I was training you... it was for a reason." He coughed, spraying a thin spume of bloody liquid down his chest. "I am not the man you thought I am. I am not Yosho."  
"You're not?" Ryoko petted her skull absently. "But we fought against each other eight-hundred years ago."  
"Yes. Yes, that is true. But I am not Yosho. Yosho died when Funaho crashed into Ryo-ohki and fell down to this planet. He broke my fall... and I broke his neck in the process."  
"Then who the hell are you?" cried Sasami.  
Skorzeny / Not Yosho's teeth gritted in pain. "Watch... this... expository flash-back..." 

==== **EXPOSITORY FLASH-BACK** ==== 

Jurai burned. Flames rose high into the night, their bulbous tips and flickering florescence illuminating the night and fields like massive funeral pyres. Many of them were, in fact, just that. Yosho, dressed in his Imperial garb, swung the Tenchi-ken around again in a low arc. Ryoko's beam-sabre deflected it, sending spinning lights and sparks glinting about the waist-high pasture.  
"You're weak, little Prince." A bitter, sibilant hiss. She dove forward, blade cutting the stalks of flowers and grass in half in a wide wake. Their blades locked and they pressed close to one another - the stench of blood and sweat lingering on Yosho, the faint cologne of perfume about Ryoko. She didn't need to sweat.  
It wasn't part of Kagato's orders. 

"You won't be saying that when I'm finished with you, Ryoko," he grinned through the weir of blood that trickled down from the cut across his scalp. Off in the distance one of the Defence Fleet's ships exploded, toppling slowly into one of the taller trees. The sound-wave hit a few moments later.  
It was all Ryoko needed, that momentary distraction, and she jumped backwards, flipping as she did so. And then she was up and floating off towards Ryo-ohki. 

Yosho was running in an instant, the grassland whipping about him like waves off a ship's bow. And then he saw the soldiers. They were running about like headless chickens: some chasing after Ryoko, others heading for the blazing crash-sites and destroyed buildings. He grabbed the closest one as he passed. "You! Quick! Come with me!"  
"Me, sir?" The soldier was young, surprised. His eyes widened. "Your Highness?!"  
"Yes! You!" Yosho pointed off at the flittering shade on the smoke-filled horizon. "We have to stop her!"  
"But-" the soldier began, then took off to catch up with his superior. "But we'll never catch her now, your Highness!" His handsome young face was illuminated by another plasma explosion.  
"My ship is waiting," said Yosho. He looked back at the other man and appraised him. 

The nights were very long in space. 

And they got very... _very_... lonely. 

He licked his lips. 

==== **END EXPOSITORY FLASH-BACK** ==== 

"Ryoko's twisted brain-wrong caused by a one-off man mental forced her to lie brain-dead and triple-spazzed on a life-glug ... SORRY- lie quadra-spazzed on a life-glug - in the remains of her obliterated ship. When I finally crawled out of Funaho, Ryoko was so sky-rocketed that she wouldn't have recognised me anyway. I was lucky not to have been killed to bits.  
"I didn't really know to kill her, so I kept her in suspended animation in the cave. Then I went down to the local village and hit on girls." 

"And then you went on to do other things," stated Washu. She felt his pulse and frowned lightly. "Sir Walter Raleigh... Wilhelm Munch... Marilyn Monroe..."  
"Yes... and Otto Skorzeny," said Katsuhito... "However, Tenchi... I.. I made a mistake. You see, I was trying to build up your strength to fight Tokimi..."  
Tenchi cocked an eyebrow. "Who?"  
"We haven't got that far in the series yet... and I doubt we ever will. But ... *cough* ... it wasn't Tokimi... it was someone far worse... someone... clos-AAAARRRRGGGGGHHHHH!!!!" 

His chest wound spurted a great globule of frothy, cartilage and bone and gristle - pumping a pint of blood out of its ragged, sodden hole. Jerking, his eyes rolling like children down a hill, he fell into deathly paroxysms. With a last gurgling gasp, he hawked a great wad of snotty blood out and died.  
"Yeee~ees?" asked Ryoko. "And?" 

Washu closed over the young, dead man's eyes.  
"Wait." Tenchi looked at the others. "But this means that if my grandfather wasn't Yosho... then Ayeka wasn't..." 

He blinked. 

"I wasted my life." 

* * * * *

_Meanwhile the golden lump of meteorite spun and sped its slow movement through the heavens, heading for that tiny town of the American mid-west... Knob-lick, Texas._

Katsuhito / Skorzeny's funeral was a simple one. Once Tenchi and the others had picked their teeth clean, they set off once again in search of some sort of exit. 

** SOMEWHERE IN THE IL PALAZZO HOTEL...**

"Noooo! Nooooo! You can't do this to me! You can't throw me to the lions! I'm a good friend of Charlton Heston!" But Nobuyuki's cries fell upon dead ears. And as the villagers threw the lit torches about the giant wicker effigy's feet, Nobuyuki - locked inside the bamboo trunk of its stomach - felt the flames begin to warm the soles of his feet. Even so he couldn't help feeling smoothly exhilarated.   
Like a flying motorcycle. 

Our band of wanderers was wandering along the wandering catacombs beneath the hotel when suddenly they were jumped by a group of occultist cultists. The details are completely unnecessary, but sometime during the ensuing scuffle - Tenchi was kicked in his happy-sac and dragged away.  
We now make an impromptu jump to further the story and include some hardcore deity-based sex. 

You have been warned. 

* * * * * 

I awoke to find myself stripped and bound, near naked, to a pole that jutted upwards from the centre of a strange, alien cavern. No one was in sight and so I took the time to laboriously catalogue the locale that I was currently residing. It was a large, domed room - carved by some hands other than human directly into the rock. The floor was dark obsidian and a glyph was inscribed across it. Describing it is hard, as it held no real understanding by the homo-sapien mind obviously having been created by the original inhabitors of this other-worldly place. The only thing I can liken it to is a cheesecake cross-bred with an octopus, the offspring of which then got intimate with a bicycle pump and the bike it rode in on.  
An altar was on the other side of the chamber, also made of that strange jet-black material the floor was constructed of.  
It can go without saying that my heart palpitated in my chest - like a young girl who's just been hit over the head with a brick in a sock. I said something along the lines of;  
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"

This of course did little to alleviate my predicament, but it did cease the quivering of my over-burdened sphinctal-muscle.

I waited there for what seemed like many hours, passing the time by imagining puerile, sexual acts between myself and the female members of my household. Then, just I when I thought that perhaps I should attempt to struggle free of my bonds, things moved in the shadows of the farthest reach of the room. Human things, to be exact - and I was more than a little surprised when two attractive and nubile young women stepped from the darkness. They were barely clothed, making my loin-clothed existence seem over-indulgent, and they practically slinked towards me, their long, fine legs taking firm steps forward as their hips wiggled provocatively.  
The first woman who was, it appeared, a very natural blonde, stopped before me - and then, with a gentle hand reached out to anoint my forehead with some curious liniment. Her hand continued downwards, to press at my left nipple, then at the left of my navel. The other woman, a girl more accurately - for she could not have entered her twenties - anointed my forehead also, and repeated the process on the right-hand side of my body.  
An electric tingle of unwanted covetousness burned icily in my gut as they did this - for they really were quite lovely little minxes (firm breasted, pointed nipples... poking pointedly through the thin straps that reached over their shoulders and held the pathetic belt-like skirt about their waists up) and ones that the average man would ply with drinks and then sod senseless...  
But I was no average man.  
"If you think you can seduce me with your malevolent sexual powers, you chaotic sirens," I said, "you're really, really, really wrong. Really."  
"Why should one want to seduce-" began the first.  
"- And despoil the sacrifice?" finished the other.  
"Sacrifice?" I struggled a little more tightly against my bonds.  
"The sacrifice of Virgo's blessed," said the younger girl. She stroked the flesh that covered my ribs. "The fool, the anointed, the King For A Day."  
I didn't really like the sound of that.

"I don't like the sound of that, really," I said. But the women ignored me, and I realised that we were not alone. Whilst I had been in this one-sided conversation, more of these strange females had entered and were now standing about the altar and facing me. They all wore equally grotesque and flimsy costumes that clung to their lithe, sensuous frames... the tight nubs of their...  
Anyway, I swallowed my pride and some spit and looked about me. There were perhaps twenty or thirty - easy enough to take on if I had the Tenchi-ken. But I didn't. It had obviously sodded off with my clothes.

One of the women stepped forward. And let me say this with full decorum and expected sensitivity that a young gentleman should give; her knockers were enormous. Really. I mean, those hooters were so large you knew she was coming around a corner a full two minutes before you saw her face. Honest to God, dear reader... I have not seen jugs that big since Ryoko and the terrible Swedish mail-order catalogue incident.  
She raised her hand in the dreaded Voorish sign, much like Washu had done earlier - and I was filled with dread.  
"What is this?" I cried.  
"You are to be sacrificed." Her hair was long and auburn, like the colour of lightly burnt yams.  
I closed my mouth. "Well... yes. That I gather."  
"You will be sacrificed to the fertility Goddess, Shub-Nigguruth - the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young," she said, "so that we all may become more fertile and pleasure our husbands with children."  
Well, I must say - their morals were significant (as were their heaving mammary mounds) - but I didn't really like the idea of having my heart cut out simply to get some salary-man a new spawn - a new mouth to bleed dry our beautiful country.  
"Piss off," I said. "Go and cut up a baby or something."

But they ignored me... they ignored me and instead they crouched around that altar. One of the women, the blonde one who had rubbed the foul-smelling salve into my nipples, stood behind me and I heard the sound of a knife being drawn from God knows where. The crouching women began to sway and bounce, and my eyes remained transfixed on their every movement... the women with the big ones did not crouch, however, but stood above the rest - stood above the altar.

"Iä, Iä, Shub-Nigguruth... Iä!" chanted that heathen group, as my mouth fell open and I craned forward, tongue drooping so low onto my chin that if someone had held a cheesecake there I might well have been able to taste it. "Iä! Iä! Aquvilis constinatorium! Gr'n Spanqu'lati - Majestica! Magna Mater!"  
And then the leader priestess woman did the unthinkable...

She peeled off her top. SHE PULLED ASIDE THE TWO THIN STRAPS OF MATERIAL THAT HELD UP HER TOP AND LET THEM SLIDE OFF HER SHOULDERS! Any red-blooded young male in the ordinance should certainly have got a jolly good kick out of what I saw right then. And let's just say that her hands weren't resting on the altar while she did this, eh? Eh? Heh... yeah.

As I was saying - it became apparent to me as this was going along that the shadows were becoming darker... and more insidiously, I noticed that they were coalescing. Forming shape above the altar. I blanched. The shadows twisted and turned, running into each other like clouds - something dark and snapping snaked out for a moment and then vanished. "COME NOT IN THAT FORM! COME NOT IN THAT FORM!" cried the high-priestess.

And then that terrible shape grew more solid, tentacles and foul pendulous things with distended nodules and leaking orifices began to form across its surface. I stood in horror! The weird monstrosity continued shifting! Oozing juices trickled about the place, squirting about the floor and walls... thick mucus coughings that splattered lumps of gelatinous goo all over the place.

Then it was finished, and Shub-Nigguruth rose from her lying position on the altar and looked about herself slowly. Her hands roved her flesh for a moment as if finding in which body her soul was now within. Her blue eyes flashed - and then they turned to the high-priestess, who remained unrobed.  
"Rosemary," said Shub-Nigguruth sweetly, "what is your sacrifice?"  
The high-priestess, Rosemary, gave a massive smile. "Him!" she pointed at me.  
Shub-Nigguruth turned her eyes to me for a moment and then her smile widened also. "Ah... yes. I see now."  
She reached her hand out and cupped Rosemary's chin. "You are a good servant. One who will be rewarded." Her hand moved down, a feather-light touch to trace the valley between those colossal baby-baiters. And then Shub-Nigguruth rose, turning to me and walking - naked.

She stopped in front of me and waited until my nose-bleed had stopped painting the floor before talking.   
"Hello Tenchi."  
My mouth remained fixed in a mask of pained surprise.  
"What's wrong? You look like you've seen a ghost."

"Well..." I managed to croak, "maybe it's because you're Tsunami."  
She folded her arms beneath her burgeoning bosom and nodded. "You were expecting someone else?"  
"But... but..." I stammered like a moron. "But you're..."

"Trees and fertility are sort of linked." She grinned and flicked her hair. "Juraians are so staid about it all... at least your people let me let my hair down for a bit."  
"W-w-what about the sacrifice?"  
"Hmmm..." Another flick of the hair, but this time with a stern face. "I surprise we're going to have sacrifice something of yours." She beamed. "And we all know what the '_little death_' is, don't we?"  
She stepped forward and wrapped her arms about my neck, pressing close against me.  
"This isn't funny!" I snapped. "Just get me out of he-" My comment was cut off by a half-gurgle as she put her hand down my loincloth.  
"Oh come now Tenchi." I felt the cold air of the cavern suddenly whip around me as the cords of my loincloth was undone and it fell about my ankles. "I am the goddess of wood and bushes..."

Then she knelt down.

* * * * *

**_Inside The Pentagon... In America..._**

Inside the USSPACECOM section of the Pentagon, the various military and scientific members 'in the know' looked at the fast moving red dot that blinked across the viewscreen which mapped out the Solar System. 

"What's gonna happen when that meteorite hits?" asked General Walters taking another puff on his phallic shaped cigar. 

"Well..." Professor Quatermass looked at the viewscreen and pondered on that for a moment. "Imagine an eighteen year old girl out in the Fens, towards the end of the last century. On the cusp of womanhood yet retaining the beauty and God given fragrance of Persephone. Her flaxen tresses are tugged playfully by the light June breeze, which carry her coy gosling giggling girly giggles like the sweetest mountain brook chattering over its pebbles. Imagine her standing on a bridge, waiting for the 4:15 from Norwich. Blast of warning horn it comes. Girl. Body. Jump. Little child yet woman, bump and splatter over hot iron. Massive iron, smash and pulp. Icky icket fly. Little brainy piece of purest teenage jelly meat, flying across a whole field and landing on a squirrels face. To the power of 1000." 

"Shit," said General Walters. 

* * * * * 

"I feel broken in and defiled," Tenchi said, propping himself against the moss-tangled wall of the cave he'd managed to hide in. "I feel... _naughty_."  
He'd managed to escape from his deflowers... after a number of sordid and lurid scenarios that will only be written about in later, NC-17 stories - but which I can safely inform you contained a large amount of whipped-cream, soapy frogs and a lycra diving-suit with the bottom cut off. The sex part had come later... and if that's anything to go by, I'm not sure you'd really want to read the NC-17 one... well, Bsmart might. But anyway-

"TENCHI!" yelled Sasami, running up and grabbing around his waist, Ryo-ohki sitting on her head.  
"Ew!" There was a short and moderately violent scuffle and Tenchi managed to cast off his apparently not aunty. "Don't touch me, you future rapist!"  
The young girl stared up at him with sad blue eyes. "But Tenchi! We've been looking all over for you!"  
"Yeah! You were! And that's not meant to be looked over!"

She gave him a funny look. And then the wall they were leaning on collapsed and the rotund bulk of Y'Golonac waddled out from its eternal resting place.

(In case you're wondering what the fudge is going on... just trust me, it'll all make sense soon.)

"ARSECANDLE!" Ryoko cried, pointing at the grotesquely shambling creature that wobbled and flobbed its way about. Its headless, corpulent body rotated towards the group who were standing at the far end from it. The beast trembled for a moment, stouter and larger than a very tall man. Perhaps 7 foot tall. Or a bit bigger. Its arms, the folds of bizarre joggling flesh jerking, raised themselves - to reveal the terrible HANDS THAT FEED covered by a tube-sock with googly eyes taped to them.  
There was a huddled intake of breath as this sanity blasting monstrosity sized them up with its eyeless body.  
"Hola! Ey em Senor Sock, eh humble sock puppayt and lov-air of women," said the right hand.

"What the fu-" started Washu. "You're not fooling anyone Y'Golonac! I know your game! You're an evil entity, not a Spanish Casanova!"

"No, that's really Senor Sock, and I am Quiet Willy, a shy but loveable hand puppet from across the lake of milk and cookies," the left hand said.

"That's so cute!" keened Sasami, who'd always been a sucker for sock-puppets. She skipped towards the shambling form faster than anyone could manage to grab her. The beast's hands smiled beneath its fluffy sock-exterior and prepared for its entrée after 50,000 years slumber behind some big stupid wall that really makes no freaking goddamn sense. What the hell am I writing? This thing's a shambles! FORGET IT!

THIS ENDS NOW!

Then zombies appeared, because everyone loves zombies. Sasami and Ryo-ohki got eaten by the big squamous thing with the mouths for hands and Ryoko died of a broken heart because her skull broke... or something. And Ayeka appeared from somewhere, but she was 30 years older because when she'd been sucked into the swirley-thing she was sent to a place beyond space-time (i.e. circa 1972). Then she found out Yosho wasn't Yosho, but was actually a stable-boy who she'd fallen in love with - but had never touched, because she was noble and he was a stinking commoner. And... er... then he pretended to be a soldier and got semi-kidnapped by Yosho.

Anyway, after some zombie based shenanigans, where Ayeka and Tenchi and the rest of the survivors... like... no-one, got holed up in the Masaki household and tried to fend off the attacking ghouls - Ayeka got killed and Tenchi ended up in some room inside Tsunami the ship- which looked exactly like some kind of stupid cast-off from _Doctor Who_

"Why am I in this room?" asked Tenchi to himself. "Could this be where an unforeseeable plot twist occurs?"  
"Yes," said Tsunami. "If there had actually been a plot, this would have been quite a twist."

SHOCK!

"You see Tenchi," Tsunami rambled, "I am the one that your Grandfather was training me to fight. I am going to destroy this world, thereby stopping Tokimi from gaining prestige and power from it as the next Jurai... and in the process piss her off immeasurably."  
"But... but... why Tsunami why?!"  
"Don't you get it, Tenchi? I created you! As a body-guard. As a warrior to defend me. As my champion. As my husband. As my sex-toy!"  
"What?!"  
"I set all of this up - thousands of years ago, starting with Ryoko's attack on Jurai - in order that you'd have the three main things of becoming a demi-God; a blatant task that needs only brute strength, a sense of justice and morality... or something, and women - so that you'd be an excellent sex god. Like myself. However, I never believed you'd be able to resist the wiles of all those women I threw into your path..."  
"My God... But... what about Sasami? She died! Shouldn't you be dead too?"  
"Sasami? HA! I have lots of avatars, Tenchi. In fact, one in five people is an avatar of me! One in three if you include dogs in the equation! Didn't you notice, Tenchi, that Mihoshi is never seen on-screen with me at the same time?"  
"No!"  
"YES! Mihoshi is an avatar of me! That's how I found out about Katsuhito's plans about teaching you to kill me! ... He was quite talkative after sex."  
"...."  
"Hitler's dead! He died back in 1945! I simply took on his form in order to lure your grandfather to his death!"  
"... And the hotel?"  
"Yes. I took on that form too."

Tenchi stared at her. "Tsunami, how could you?! You killed them all!"  
"Kill them, Tenchi? Within the next six months the entire Earth will be purged of every living thing!"  
"No!"  
"YES! JOIN ME TENCHI, AND WE WILL CONTROL THE UNIVERSE TOGETHER!"

"_NO_!" Tenchi collapsed, the Tenchi-ken in his hands. "No! How could you do this, Tsunami! You killed Ayeka! You killed your own sister!"  
"Actually I'm made out of quantum gases not DNA or physical structure. She was my sister in no more than name."  
"BUT I LOVED HER!"  
"Yes, but I'm better than her. You didn't complain when we did all those disgusting acts on the floor of my followers' temple, did you?"  
"I was drugged!"

"I won't ask again, Tenchi. Join me, or I will show you what will happen to your planet. EVERYTHING."

"NEEEE~EEEEVEEEER!!!!"

"Then see your _FUTURE!_"

* * * * *

_Dear Reader,  
Due to extraneous circumstances, this story has been shut down. The author's rights and monetary accounts have been suspended until such a time that guilt and deliberateness of insults, militancy and criminal wrong-doing has been ascertained. Until such a time, please enjoy this refreshing poem._

_ Yours Sincerely,  
The Thought-Police_

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

**Phantom Pain**

Around, all around, the furies gather.  
My dread grows as the stroke of death falls against my naked soul.  
It slays me, and darkly my  
essence drips  
to the barren land.  
In a haze of shock I hang my head  
while Death's shadow laughs cruelly.  
Now alone, my cry of mercy falls upon uncaring eyes.  
  
This is your love

- - - - - - - - - -

**Ministry Agent is:** Going to get his head kicked in for this, isn't he?

**To all those people going to ask if I was drugged while writing this: **The amount of heroin I take is harmless. I inject once a month on a purely recreational basis. But what about others who aren't as well off - aren't as middle-class as me? Builders or blacks for example? To them my advice is to stay well away. Good Luck.

Oh yeah... I said it'd all make sense... So... er...

**_Somewhere in England_**

Sir Integra sat behind her chair and shuffled her papers. After a moment she raised her gaze to one of the Hellsing Organisation's vampiric duo - Seras Victoria. She gave her a stern look. "A flying, bat-winged thing was seen hovering over Buckingham Palace earlier, Officer Seras. I expressly ordered for you to get Alucard to handle it... yet I find some time later that after swooping about for a while, the creature appears to have eaten two horses, a member of the Coldstream Guards and three Japanese tourists. Finally it was shot down by an RAF Tornado. Would you care to explain why this is?"  
"Well," started Seras, "It's a bit hard to explain, you see. I can't find Alucard."  
"You can't?"  
"No... he doesn't seem to have come back from his holiday in Japan."

... YOU GULLIBLE SUCKERS!!!

**_P.S_**. This story sucks. But at least it's not an Inu-yasha Cross-over lemon... or something.

Tenchi rocked backwards and forwards slowly, the back of his head coming into contact with the soft padded wall each time he leant too far. His felt-tip pen had protected him so far, and he kept it clenched tightly in his hand. The crosses he'd drawn on his face and arms and hands and clothes had kept them away for the last few weeks... but who knew how long it would last? He'd started drawing more crosses on the walls, so that his room as well as himself would be safe. Hopefully. Most likely.  
The slot in the door slid open and a thin trickle of electric light illuminated a rectangle on the floor. Then it vanished again.  
From outside there was the clank of keys and the grinding of the door's lock, and finally the door swung open. Two men were there, along with the orderly - who carried his nightstick carefully.  
"Will you be okay?" he asked, keeping an eye on Tenchi dutifully.  
"We'll be fine," said the first man.  
"I'll have to lock the door behind you."  
"That's fine," said the first man again. The second man walked over to Tenchi and knelt next to him.  
The orderly closed the door slowly. "You just bang if you need anything."

"Hello," said the first man when the door was closed. He addressed Tenchi as if it were a simple greeting in the street. "My name's Detective Chomi. And this is Detective Watanabe. We're with the Okayama police department. We've come here to talk to you."  
"It's started, hasn't it?" Tenchi looked up at them.  
"Nothing's started," said the second man - Detective Watanabe-, a little brusquely.  
Tenchi stopped rocking. "You wouldn't be here otherwise."  
"We're just interested in what you have to say..." said the Detective Chomi.  
"I hear them." Tenchi grinned. "I can help stop it if you give me back my sword-"  
"Your stick."  
"My sword," reiterated Tenchi. "She scared me. She made me go mad. But I'm better now. I can defeat her."  
"Defeat who?" Detective Watanabe leant forward. "Defeat who, Tenchi?"

Tenchi grinned again and pointed to one of the walls. Drawn in permanent marker-pen was a childish caricature of a tree; a bushy cloud for its leaves - a basic trunk. The only thing that set it apart from any other tree that the two detectives had seen was the pair of pendulous breasts that hung from its stem, and the eyes that seemed to stare outwards from the centre of the leaves.  
"She goes by many names." Tenchi looked back at the two men.

The two Detectives got up to go - Chomi rapping on the metal door.  
"New York will be gone next week," said Tenchi simply. He returned his gaze to the ground and restarted his rocking.  
Watanabe sniffed loudly as the door squealed open. "I don't think so, Tenchi."

Only when the door was closed behind them and they were standing out in the corridor, did Watanabe finish his words; "- They've got enough food to last them another month."  
"I dunno, Watanabe." Chomi pulled a cigarette out of his pocket. The Orderly gave him a stern look and the Detective put it back. "He hasn't got it wrong yet."  
"Ah... he's just lucky. Somebody must keep letting slip stuff to him."  
They turned and marched off down the corridor as the screams and wails of Okayama Asylum's damned rang through the blocks and corridors.

Outside the two men walked past the armoured personnel carrier and the guard-post that had been set up, and got into their unmarked police car. Then, slowly, like a hearse, they drove out of the asylum's compound and towards the fractured, burning sky.

**THE END**


End file.
